


All Things Changed

by rotarycell



Category: Black Panther (2018), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Djalia | Ancestral Plane (Marvel), Gen, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-20
Updated: 2019-03-20
Packaged: 2019-11-26 15:11:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18182210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rotarycell/pseuds/rotarycell
Summary: After Thanos, the throne of Wakanda sits empty once again.  Shuri steps up to take her brother's place.





	All Things Changed

**Author's Note:**

> I thought perhaps I ought to post something of this before Endgame came and jossed it (you might argue that the trailers already did, but SHH, SHH, THE MOVIE ISN'T OUT YET IT DOESN'T COUNT). Loosely inspired by jo-crimes' art  here. 

The light had a strange quality to it. Shuri stepped out of the mouth of the cave into the shallow pool at the top of the waterfall, blinking as her eyes adjusted. Though the sun burned down, making the body paint itch between her shoulder blades, it seemed dim and strange, a little yellow, like the morning just before a storm. The sky had not been entirely clear since the battle ended. Maybe it was only the clouds, or maybe there was something wrong, something changed, in the sunlight itself.

Or maybe that was only her imagination.

She waded out further, spear and shield making awkward weights in her hands. Chanting from every tier of the rock face bolstered her up, but it, too, was less than it should be. Evacuees were still trickling back into Birnin Zana from the mountains and the countryside, but she and the remaining tribal leaders had agreed that they could not wait. Killmonger had taught them all the dangers of a power vacuum, and whatever happened now, Wakanda could not be seen as weak or leaderless. Her people were spread thin around the rocks, and though they tried gamely to do what was right and proper for a king’s challenge, she could see even from here that many were still in shock, going through ritual motions while their minds circled again and again the horror just passed.

There was one dissonant note in the whole gathering. For the first time in Wakanda’s history, the Jabari had come to take their rightful place in the challenge ceremony. They filled their places in the rock, all warriors, all survivors of the battle. They did not come to disrupt the ceremony, but they chanted their own chants, in their own language, and did not try very hard to mesh with the other tribes. They hooted as loudly as they had when M’Baku came to offer challenge all unexpected, perhaps trying to prove that they were not changed by what had happened on the battlefield. It seemed a very Jabari way of handling things.

The head shaman stepped towards her, the hem of her robes wet, and thumped the heavy ritual spear in the water. There was no tremble in her voice as she began the ceremony, laying out the parameters of the challenge. She was too much of a professional to do otherwise.

So many faces were missing. Shuri watched each tribe come forward, quiet for once. The Merchant’s champion had died in the battle, gored by one of the alien’s nightmare creatures, and his place was now filled by a tall, angular woman, covered head to toe in layers and layers of deep blue cloth. The leader of the Mining tribe had turned to dust and her mother had come out of retirement to stand in her place, gray-haired and stone-faced. Both representatives of the River tribe were new to their posts: their leader, too, had turned to dust, never again to grace the council chambers with his magnificent suits. Nakia lived, thanks be to Bast, but she was still in America. She had barely managed to make contact at all, and they had all agreed that there was too much risk in sending a flyer for her when the situation was so delicate. The two men standing in their places now looked nervous, uncomfortable in their positions. The leader of the Border tribe had been injured, not in battle but by one of the breeding rhinos, which had panicked when the disintegration began. His leg was in a splint, but he could sit upright, and as more doctors began trickling back into the city he would be healed soon enough.

M’baku loomed in his place above the falls, broad-chested, unchanged. Beside him stood one of his warriors, a short, deep-lunged mountain woman in furs. When it came their turn to offer or deny the challenge, they held their silence for a long moment. It grew heavy, spreading over the other tribes, until only the falls themselves made any sound, roaring over the rocks.

Shuri stood, her feet going numb as the water rushed around her ankles, still on the surface but powerful underneath. She met M’Baku’s gaze, tilting her chin up. She thought of saying something cheeky but did not.

“The Jabari,” M’Baku began, and paused. The tension made the air thick, even in the tepid yellow light. “…will not challenge today.”

A sigh swept across the gathered tribes. Shuri just barely managed to stop herself from rolling her eyes. He was so dramatic.

The shaman waded out to her again, her professional mask cracked just enough to show relief. She laid the ancient panther necklace around Shuri’s neck, so the teeth and bones settled heavy on her breast. Stepping back, she said, “Behold your queen!”

Shuri saluted her people, and the tip of the spear in her hand caught a flare of light as the sun appeared from behind a cloud and quickly vanished again. Wakanda chanted her name, tired and heartsick.

She managed to catch M’Baku before she left the falls for the dead city.

“No challenge today, Great Gorilla?”

He grunted and said nothing.

“Two years ago you said you had watched in disgust as we left our technological advances in the hands of a child,” she said, “You said you would not have it.”

“That was two years ago,” he said. “Yesterday I saw great metal rings come down from the sky and spew forth mad things born on another world. I saw that white woman make a red light in her hands and pull them from the earth. I saw good warriors turn to dust where they stood. The world is mad and all things are changed, now, perhaps beyond fixing. No man, no tribe, no nation will be what it once was. Where does that leave a traditionalist like me, hmm? And also you are no longer a child, my Queen.” He paused a long moment, and added, “I think none of us on this Earth is a child, now.”

They paused at the splitting of the ways, two paths winding down the rocks from the falls, one north, one east. “Maybe. Still, now more than ever we need someone willing to hold on to the old ways, to remember. We can’t hope to rebuild without solid foundations.”

M’Baku looked at her with some astonishment and laughed. “What’s this, Shuri, daughter of Ramonda, talking about the old ways? Has your head come out of the vibranium mines? The world is mad indeed!”

“I’m trying to be diplomatic, you ass.”

He laughed again and clapped her on the shoulder companionably. “All right, little sister. Go, claim your throne.”

“Stick around, M’Baku. I will call the Tribal Council soon.”

They parted ways, he towards the river roads back to the Golden City, she to the long, stony slope down into the mist-wreathed City of the Dead. Once off the high cliffs surrounding the falls, she soon came under the trees, out of the hot, strange glare of the sun. The three big towers over the catacombs rose up from that cool shade, huge blind silent guardians.

The herb garden was at the heart of the Hall of Kings, as it always had been. The whole room still reeked of smoke, even after all this time, and the planting beds lay dark and bare. T’Challa had spent a good half-year searching the country for more of the herb, amid all the other work of healing Wakanda from its brief civil war and opening the borders, a labor that yielded only a bare handful of wild plants. Even now, two years on, their transplants here filled only the smallest corner of the immense room.

The ashes of the old garden made a rich soil for the new crop, at least. So the shamans all said. In time the garden would be full again. Even so, as Shuri hurried down the narrow central path, she thought she spied one or two sickly growths among the softly-glowing herbs. Of all the wounds Killmonger had left his homeland, that might be the longest to heal.

The shaman beckoned, and Shuri descended wide stone stairs to the innermost of the sacred places in the catacombs, the high, dim room floored in red sand. The walls were rough, the air cool, the light low. There were slit-windows cut into the rock very high up, near the ceiling, that let in a few bare threads of light, and a few torches. Under them, in the shadows, Shuri knelt and drank the preparation of the heart-shaped herb.

It was bitter on her tongue. In the dim torchlight Shuri lay back, arms crossed, and let the acolytes shovel the cool, dry sand over her. She closed her eyes and saw the vision she knew she would be seeing behind her closed lids for the rest of her life, the shattered windows in the lab and through them, a long way off, the thick, terrible haze of dust over the battlefield.

Then all that went away, and she sat up. Earth fell away from her, not the clean red sand of the City of the Dead but the rich, sun-warm dirt of a grassy plain, though surely no living sun had ever touched this earth. The whole sky filled with a strange, sourceless violet light from one horizon to another, and the Ancestral Plane stretched away from her in all directions, dotted here and there with trees dark against the vivid sky. A warm wind blew, heavy with the scent of grass and growing things, a living scent, though this was the land of the dead.

Shuri stood and began walking. There seemed to be no directions, here, no east or west, no sun or moon, only stars she did not know. It might have troubled her, except that the green-scented breath of the wind and the warm earth and the painted sky filled her with a peace she had rarely known before. Maybe, once or twice, when all her work came together just so and she could look at something she had made and see it all at once, whole and perfect, without picking out a dozen things that needed to be improved immediately, had she felt like this. There was no hurry. There was no fear, here.

A black, velvet shadow stood up from the deeper shadows around the roots of an acacia, and Shuri saw that it was a panther. Yet even as she saw this, it was no cat at all but her father.

“Baba!” she cried, leaping into his arms, and he laughed and lifted her right off her feet, as he had done since she was a child. She knew too much of him now to see him as she once had, as a perfect king and father, as a peerless Black Panther. He was only a man. The shine was off his memory. Still, he looked and felt and smelled like the man who’d raised her, who she had looked up to all her life, and though Killmonger’s legacy weighed heavy on her mind, tears sprang into her eyes and she held her father tightly.

“Shuri, my daughter, let me look at you,” T’Chaka said. He held her out at arm’s length, perhaps smiling and perhaps not. “You’ve grown so much. I had not thought to see you here for many years yet, dearest, and never like this.”

“So much has happened, Baba. I was never supposed to be Queen! I am not prepared for this.”

T’Chaka did smile, then. “Your brother said much the same. Yet are you not my daughter, raised in the palace, tutored in statecraft just as T’Challa was? You have poured all your passion into Wakanda’s technological innovation, but you have all the learning to serve our people from the throne, too. Everything is changed, now, but you have always looked to the future. Who else can hold our people together in this new world but you, Shuri?”

Frowning, she asked, “Where is T’Challa? I wanted to sock him in the nose for making me do his job. Is he running about on all fours?”

“He is not here.”

A chill shot through her, unease chasing away the dreamy sunless warmth. “How can that be? This is the Ancestral Plane. All of Bast’s children come here when their time is ended. T’Challa turned to dust on the battlefield, Okoye saw him, touched him. He is dead. He must be here! Where else could he go?”

T’Chaka looked grim. “I do not know. Everything is changed, I said, perhaps even death. You could walk end to end in these plains that have no end and not find him.”

“Maybe I will, then. I won’t let him get away so easily. He owes me for interrupting all my projects, you know!”

“Shuri.” Now T’Chaka looked troubled, in this place where no trouble should be. “You cannot stay here long, unless you mean to stay forever. You must go back into life, my daughter. Wakanda needs you.”

“I will go,” she said, “but I mean to look, first.”

She turned away from her father, and over her shoulder she saw a change in that featureless sky. A spear of ruddy light cleaved through the violet clouds from a bright point on the horizon, like sunset or sunrise, a wrong note. In front of that red light stood a dark silhouette, a knot of hard, mean, squarish buildings. They were the only dead structures in the whole living plain.

She had a way to go now, and she hurried towards it. Other spirits of the Ancestral Plane tracked her path, walking with her or near her. Sometimes they were panthers, in ones and twos, soft, silent shadows with bright eyes. Sometimes they were people, men and women with features almost familiar to her. Now that she saw the fault in the Ancestral Plane, she became aware of a strange tension in the air, and sometimes the figures following her seemed to be nothing she could name. Odd sounds came from the tall grasses, not quite right for a panther’s tread, or a man’s. When the wind changed direction, she smelled something off, something industrial or acrid, coming from the buildings. Once or twice she thought she saw strange shapes in the distance, things not of Earth.

An old woman kept pace with her most of the way. She did not speak, only clasped her hands behind her back and matched her steps to Shuri’s. Shuri did not recognize her, but her features reminded her painfully of T’Challa. She had his brow, his eyes, his long stride. She must have been an ancestor of theirs, some many-times-great grandmother. Where she walked, the strange shadows did not follow.

The buildings had seemed far away when she spotted them, but distance did not seemed to have much meaning, here. The walk was short. The ground under her feet changed, the grass drying and becoming sparse, giving way to weed-filled gravel and crumbling asphalt. The silent woman kissed her on the brow and departed, the panthers fell away. She was alone.

Shuri came up to a chain-link fence. It hemmed in a parking lot turned basketball court at the feet of a beaten-up apartment complex. She reached out and touched the fence, frowning. She knew this place, though she had never seen it looking quite this tired and abandoned. Oakland, California. Killmonger’s home.

She tried circling around the basketball court to the rear door of the building, or the gate into the next property over, where the main entrance to the Wakandan Outreach Center now was, but there seemed to be no way in. Wherever she went, however she turned, Shuri found herself back where she had begun, standing outside the fence.

If you fail, try another approach. Shuri leapt up, grabbing for the links of the fence, and began climbing. At first it seemed easy, the links making for good hand and footholds, but though she climbed until her arms began to feel tired, the top of the fence never seemed to come any nearer.

Something huge and golden leapt at her from the other side, and Shuri yelped. The fence swayed and rattled under the force of the impact, and she clutched at it, just barely keeping hold. The creature looked at her a moment, and Shuri had a brief impression of bright eyes and soft fur and too-big claws hooked into the fence far too close to her before it dropped back to the pavement inside.

The jaguar looked up at her, and it seemed to be laughing. It paced a little on its side of the fence, alert and predatory. Ah. Of course.

Seeing nothing else to do, Shuri dropped down to talk to her cousin. She had climbed a long way up, but the drop was short, a few feet at most. She dusted off her hands.

“Well, Killmonger,” she said.

The jaguar grinned at her and stretched in a little mocking bow.

“Oh, so you’re going to be insufferable about this?”

The jaguar stretched the other way, yawning. With all its teeth bared, she could see that the lower canines were gold, two bright, sharp half-moons. Then it stood up and put on the face she had known and loathed so briefly in life.

“Hey, cuz,” said Killmonger. He wore Western clothes, low-slung jeans and a hoodie, as out of place as this concrete prison in the middle of the sacred plain.

“N’Jadaka,” she said. “I was looking for my brother, but I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised I found you instead.”

“T’Challa ain’t here, homegirl. This is the land of the glorious dead.” He grinned without humor and spread his arms, encompassing the cracked asphalt, the tired concrete buildings, the violet sky caged by the high, cheap fence.

Shuri frowned. “My father said the same. But how can that be? He is dead. The alien killed him with his ridiculous cosmic gauntlet thing. Where could he be, if not here?”

“Maybe he got lost,” said Killmonger, “It’s a damn big ugly world out there. Maybe he’s kicking around the wrong side of the galaxy right now.”

“Oh, very helpful, very nice, dear cousin. I see now why I came to you for news, indeed I do.”

He made a face at her.

“But he can’t be living, his body is dust.”

“Could still be lost.”

Shuri frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. There’s something in the air here that ain’t right. There’s things in the shadows that don’t belong. You walked halfway across the Ancestral Plane to find me, you must have seen it.”

“I heard something,” said Shuri cautiously, “or felt something. Something wrong. But everything has felt wrong since the alien left.”

“On Earth, sure. But in death? No one should be here but our people, and yet.” He gestured broadly. “I’ve seen things with way too many legs, out in the grass. I’ve seen things too tall to be men, here in the corridors. I can’t see them clearly, they’re gone when I try to really look, but they’re there. Just before you came I swear I saw a chick with green skin, like on Star Trek. Think Orion women are real?”

Shuri stared at him a long moment. “You think T’Challa’s spirit went somewhere else.”

“Some alien Valhalla, maybe. Why not? Something’s broken. There’s a great big crack right through reality. Who knows what’s possible?”

“A crack.” Shuri frowned. Well, why not? Surely no one was meant to have the kind of power Thanos had wielded in bringing about his vision. He had re-written reality with a snap of his fingers. Of course he did it badly. “Is that why you’re here? This place doesn’t belong.”

Killmonger barked a laugh and leaned against the fence. “Naw, cuz, can’t you see this is exactly where I belong? Right where my daddy raised me.”

Shuri opened her mouth to contradict him, but then something occurred to her. It was such a strange thought that she paused, struck dumb for a moment.

For most of her life, the word “hell” had not had much meaning, a foreign exclamation without any substance behind it. Her religion had no equivalent concept at all; in life one might please the gods and be rewarded, or anger them and be punished, but that was life, this life. The Ancestral Plane was neither punishment nor reward but simply a place to go, the place all Bast’s children went when they died. You did not earn entrance, and you could not lose it. It was a birthright. The gods could be fickle, but they had no use for eternal torment.

It was not until she began her work in America that she realized that to many “hell” did have meaning, a great deal of it. Most of the families she met at the Oakland facility were Christians of one stripe or another, and while they might disagree with each other on what exactly it was like—a lake of fire for burning damned souls, or torment by demons, or simply a rejection from their one big all-encompassing God whose love was the most essential thing in their whole cosmology—they agreed that hell was real. They feared it, and some spent a great deal of time and prayer and tears trying to avoid it.

N’Jobu had certainly taught his son the worship of Bast, as was right and proper for a son of Wakanda, but it would as surely have been a secret, just like the rest of his heritage. And Killmonger had lost him so young. Everyone else around him, his friends and his teachers and whatever foster parents had taken him in, even, perhaps, his mother, would have been full of the big Christian God, and Jesus, and the Devil. He would have grown up saturated in talk of Hell.

A whole childhood of listening to that might convince anyone that it was real, or, at least, that it ought to be. That life was only the trial that determined how you spent your afterlife.

Perhaps he had put himself here.

He stood like that for a moment, leaning against the fence, which bowed out under his weight but would not let him through. It was hard to smell the grass, here in this little concrete block, hard to feel the warm wind. Killmonger looked out past her, not towards the baleful red glow she’d followed to find him but back over her shoulder, towards the serene violet clouds over the infinite plain. Very far away something was moving among the grasses, a man or a panther.

“You still got my suit?” he asked abruptly.

Shuri blinked. “Yes, we have it. T’Challa wanted to bury you with it, but Nakia and I convinced him it was no good sinking perfectly good vibranium to the bottom of the ocean like that. He keeps it in his office. Kept it.”

Killmonger turned towards her, but the light of the Plane was reflecting in his eyes and she could not read his expression. “He went and buried me at sea?” He sounded surprised, which for some reason infuriated her.

“Of course he did, you asked him to. He’d have done almost anything you asked in that moment.”

“Huh,” he said. He grinned, flashing those ridiculous gold teeth. “That must have been a fun session with the Tribal Council, that sentimental ass telling them he was heading off to hold a state funeral for his enemy. Whatever. Listen, Shuri, I know you ain’t planning to just sit on your ass when you leave here.”

“Of course not. Something’s broken in the world, you said. We have to fix it. Not just for Wakanda, or for Earth, but for all things, all people.”

“I want you to wear the gold necklace,” said Killmonger. His eyes locked with hers, bright jaguar’s eyes. “This ugly purple colonizer, this Thanos? He shows his face again, I want you to claw his eyes out for me.”

“I will.”

Killmonger nodded, smiled, crossed his arms across his chest. “Thank you, Queen Shuri. Now go home, girl. You’ve been here too long already.”

Shuri barely had enough time to return the gesture before the world ripped away from her. The warm wind blew out and she stumbled forward, gasping for breath in cold air, shedding sand everywhere. Stars danced in her eyes and her lungs burned with every breath, she could not see and could not keep her feet under her. Hands caught her, hot against her chilled skin, and a calm, even voice said “Breathe, breathe…”

She did as the voice asked, at first short, sharp breaths, growing deeper and more even. The dazzle cleared from her eyes and she could see around her the sacred room, the pit of red sand, the shamans hovering anxiously over her.

“Are you all right, Queen Shuri?” asked the head shaman. She still held Shuri by the arms, a warm, familiar presence. “You were under for a long time.”

“Fine,” said Shuri. She looked at her fingernails and saw that they were looking rather blue, even in the dim torchlight. “I’m fine. I need to get back to the city. There is work to be done.”


End file.
